Less than four years ago we asked here whether online gamers playing Foldit could help perfect the de novo design of proteins that do not exist in nature. Four months ago we reported that Foldit players had succeeded where scientists had failed in solving the structure of an important viral enzyme. Now Scientific American reports that Foldit players have topped scientists in redesigning a protein—the challenge we suggested less than four years ago. From “Online gamers achieve first crowd-sourced redesign of protein“:

Obsessive gamers’ hours at the computer have now topped scientists’ efforts to improve a model enzyme, in what researchers say is the first crowdsourced redesign of a protein.

The online game Foldit, developed by teams led by Zoran Popovic, director of the Center for Game Science, and biochemist David Baker, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, allows players to fiddle at folding proteins on their home computers in search of the best-scoring (lowest-energy) configurations.

The researchers have previously reported successes by Foldit players in folding proteins, but the latest work moves into the realm of protein design, a more open-ended problem. By posing a series of puzzles to Foldit players and then testing variations on the players’ best designs in the lab, researchers have created an enzyme with more than 18-fold higher activity than the original. The work was published January 22 in Nature Biotechnology [abstract].

“I worked for two years to make these enzymes better and I couldn’t do it,” says Justin Siegel, a post-doctoral researcher working in biophysics in Baker’s group. “Foldit players were able to make a large jump in structural space and I still don’t fully understand how they did it.” …

The latest effort involved an enzyme that catalyses one of a family of workhorse reactions in synthetic chemistry called Diels-Alder reactions. Members of this huge family of reactions are used throughout industry to synthesize everything from drugs to pesticides, but enzymes that catalyze Diels-Alder reactions have been elusive. In 2010, Baker and his team reported that they had designed a functional Diels–Alderase computationally from scratch [abstract], but, says Baker, “it wasn’t such a good enzyme”. The binding pocket for the pair of reactants was too open and activity was low. After their attempts to improve the enzyme plateaued, the team turned to Foldit.

In one puzzle, the researchers asked users to remodel one of four amino-acid loops on the enzyme to increase contact with the reactants. In another puzzle, players were asked for a design that would stabilize the new loop. The researchers got back nearly 70,000 designs for the first puzzle and 110,000 for the second, then synthesized a number of test enzymes based on the best designs, ultimately resulting in the final, 18-fold-more-active enzyme.…

The article was written by Jessica Marshall and reprinted in Scientific American with permission from Nature, where it was originally published as “Victory for crowdsourced biomolecule design: Players of the online game Foldit guide researchers to a better enzyme.” The article does an excellent job of describing how researchers and game players collaborated to achieve the final result. The gamers explored much more radical changes to the protein than can be done by conventional molecular biology techniques such as directed evolution, which typic[a]lly explores only single amino acid substitutions. The researchers then physically constructed and characterized the enzyme designed by the gamers.

The choice as design target of an enzyme to catalyze Diels-Alder reactions is particularly interesting from the standpoint of developing advanced nanotechnology, also referred to as molecular manufacturing. As noted in the 2010 Science paper, this reaction is a “cornerstone” in organic synthesis, and no naturally occurring enzymes are known to catalyze this reaction. As early as 1994 Markus Krummenacker proposed the use of Diels-Alder cycloaddition in a strategy to develop molecular building blocks for molecular manufacturing (“Steps towards molecular manufacturing“).

What roles crowd-sourcing, citizen science, and de novo protein design will play in the development of molecular manufacturing, or productive nanosystems, remains to be seen, but this latest result looks like an important step alog the way.
—James Lewis